


to be (pushed down and) lifted strong

by starlingale



Series: ... [1]
Category: God's Own Country (2017)
Genre: D/s tendencies, M/M, Mid-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-02-06 01:08:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12806271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlingale/pseuds/starlingale
Summary: "The idea became that Gheorghe’s thing is he gets off on being caring, that’s what turns him on."





	to be (pushed down and) lifted strong

Last autumn, Gheorghe was convinced that he would avoid working for families as long as he could find any other way to survive. Compared to the bleak yet predictable world of agribusiness, counting on the good will of strangers was not worth the risk. Yes, the three weeks of emergency substituting a supervisor in a fancy ecological farm were good - most of his co-workers were shiny-eyed international volunteers, which meant the housing and food were good enough to attract the hippies, and he could share those despite being paid. But this was before the place in Kilburn from where he had simply ran away after a day, with the slim satisfaction that the hassle of finding someone else in his place was probably worth his lost wage, and after the farm where he had to sleep in the hay. At large companies he at least had the advantage of camaraderie with the other workers, and over a certain scale it became a good investment for businesses to keep an eye on what the minimum levels of worker protection and accomodations were, according to the law. By the beginning of spring, he had an agreement made in advance with a large potato farm up north. The starting date was negotiable, so when he saw the ad for lambing, he could have just as easily passed it up, even if it paid somewhat better than a week of his real job.

But he was interested in the work itself, that was the thing. He learned lambing from his grandfather, and later they have decided to sell their sheep relatively early in the farm's long slide into bankrupcy, so his mind still associated the smell of wet wool with the good times in his life. The breed was different and the weather did not deserve to be called spring, but feeling his skills in his fingers and saving the fuzzy, stupid little lives of lambs and ewes alike has made him feel more like a person again. 

The conditions were shitty, but the farmer's son was sharing them with him out here, so at least he was not treated worse for who he was, right now. He couldn't have imagined his own grandmother ever sending him out for days on end with no real food prepared and packed, so in his diagnostic on the family's situation, to the messed-up son, crumbling walls and stroke-riddled father he silently added Dreidre being overwhelmed, too. He knew what a declining farm looked like, and he would have been ready to feel solidarity with them, if it wasn't for the slurs.

The funny thing is that there was a point in his life where he would have wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment behind Johnny's words, as long as the category would not have included himself. The year before losing the farm and being pushed to leave the country, he had even signed some petition calling the... EU? UN? whoever is supposed to turn vague internet clicks into reality, to rename the Roma (or, god forbid, Romani) into... well, anything, really, as long as it did not resemble the name of Romania. The idea was that romanians were only treated badly in the West because the locals' well-deserved hatred towards dirty gypsies was accidentally spilling over them. The signers have imagined the English, amongst others, as people ready to accept their poor, exploited countrymen as good people and deserving european citizens, if it wasn't for this annoying little misunderstanding.

It took a month of doing menial work for racists for him to click into place that this is not how any of this works. By now he wouldn't have minded if someone got confused about his ethnicity, but of course, “gyppo” was not an innocent mistake. It was a slur, fully intended.

So when push came to shove, he had let his anger overtake him and shoved the little twerp right into the mud.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Johnny hated the cold, the ruin they had to sleep in, the fucking beauty of the romanian, the way he was better with the farm after two days than himself after his whole life, the cold again, the way his nights of oblivion-by-alcohol were put on hold by the obligation to stay out here with Gheorghe, and bloody Pot Noodles. 

Of course he hated himself the most of all: for being too weak to stand up against his father and being too weak to treat the poor man better (sometimes for both in the same time), for being too fed up and overwhelmed to reform the way the farm was run, even as its decline was strikingly obvious. He hated himself for the amount he drank and he hated his family for not letting him go even further with washing his mind away with alcohol. He hated his need for people and in particular the freakishness of his turn-ons, which raised the stakes of ever trying to trust someone as a partner to unacceptable heights (as if he had any chances to begin with), and he hated Freddy from the auction who tried to turn into a permanent thing a pseudo-anonymous dynamic whose sole advantage was, to him, that it did get him off while avoiding by far dealing with the mushier, needier parts of his mind. He would have preferred not knowing even his name, but of course the town was too small for that.

He hated and envied his mum for leaving, and he hated himself for envying that runt of a lamb Gheorghe has held to his chest, enveloping it with his coat. He even catched him murmuring to it in romanian once, which was at least hilarious, as moments of exclusion go.

He hated Gheorghe for the power of the attraction stirred by him, and he hated himself for trying to balance this perceived power differential with whatever racist slurs he could use – and the more he did it, and the more of it the romanian absorbed, the more he turned in his own mind into a monsturous asshole, abusing someone who was not in a position to resist. Too bad he knew self-hate like the palm of his hand, and he knew that it was of absolutely no use.

So when Gheorghe unexpectedly, finally attacked him and put him in a ground hold, he felt an immense responsibility evaporating at once. If this stranger could defend himself, then there was a limit for the damage he would be able to cause him. And he was lonely and confused and needy, and has spent all his willpower already on not watching him while he washed himself just a few step behind his back, so his mind couldn't resist changing tracks mid-tumble. At once he got mesmerized by the paradoxical safety of being held down, of having already lost. The weight of the man laying over him, his naked chest, the warmth of his breath, the passion and focus on his face (finally looking in his eyes with full intensity), his strong hands around his head... Johnny's tongue slid out to lick his lips.

He was a freak, after all. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He did not expect the farmer's son to stop fighting so soon. He grabbed his wrists, yes, and tried to wriggle out of his hold, but then his movements slowed and his expression softened into a look that has made him remember at once that he was naked to the waist up. 

His anger flown out in words, as intended, but before his conscious mind could have intervened, the word “fuck” had sneaked into what he said.

Well.

He spent the day slowly turning the situation over in his mind. Yes, he knew that the man was attracted to him, and if it wasn't for his attitude, he might have given him a chance. Johnny was in a grim situation, and during the day he could see in him a need that was too strong to hide. What's more important, he stopped completely with the namecalling – he was down to his last strike, but he did manage to avoid ruining it for himself. When Johnny cut his palm, he decided to make a gesture out of it, permitting himself to mix care with power, pushing his wrist where he wanted, and he'd not only let him, but with a beautiful expression on his face, too. He accepted his spit like a sacrament. Gheorghe has found himself wanting to push and prod and pet him into reacting again and more, to get under his skin and guide him out of his mind. And he was feeling sorry for him, despite it all. He felt a taste of what soothing his pain could be, and he knew he would have enjoyed more. 

He has long been in peace with his own needs, and he had already faced the fact that since they'd split up with Andrei, he didn't really have the luxury of satisfying them. He was usually not staying in the same farm for a long enough time for actually getting to know people, he worked in a series of places which were variations on the theme of “the ass of nowhere with population zero”, anonymous sex was boring and most of the guys he found on apps were either avoiding his kind or treated being dommed by a romanian as the equivalent of being pissed on, the perverse excitement being deeply intertwined with the humiliation of it – and the cherry on top was that the internet connection itself tended to be unreliable and slow. He never would have guessed that part of his homesickness will crystallize around the good old broadband of Timiş county. Before leaving his winter job, he has sold his smartphone as the rational alternative of what had felt more attractive by the day, just smashing it down to the ground until it would have broken into pieces.

Now he had half a week alone with this man with the plush lower lip (maybe he could make him bite it), who liked being subdued and who kept glancing at him like he was the last source of warmth left in his world. And who was fucked up by an understandable amount and then some beyond that, and who tried to keep it all in by crumbling, painful walls, which presented a clear-cut challenge. He catched himself looking at his face and wanting him to look back trough his eyelashes again.

And he was, in fact, lonely and touch-starved. He'd spent the winter being replaceable and easily forgotten.

So when Johnny had finally made his approach, with a cocky attitude that he could not expect to end in any other way than with him being restrained again, he smiled a little to himself before turning towards him and getting into the fight in earnest.

**Author's Note:**

> Most words of the title from the ending song, Patrick Wolf: The days.
> 
> Also other words from Francis Lee, the writer/director, in the summary - which I am not trying to use to legitimize my own take (which is slightly different even from the way I interpret the movie itself, anyway, and that one is subjective too), but coming up with summaries is haaard, the quote was convenient, and then it felt fair to mention who it was from.


End file.
